Posts Tagged ‘short short stories’

“No, no, no…would you cut that out asshole?” Roger wasn’t a fan of his authority being challenged. Apparently, Orlando wasn’t a good listener. Roger’s team of rag-tag hoodlums was nothing to write home about, but it was all he had and he couldn’t pull this off without them.

“You said to keep the gun on ‘im.”

“Yes, I did say to keep the gun on him, I didn’t say to shoot off body parts.” The frustration was eating Davidson alive. He’d planned this heist for years. He couldn’t believe it was actually a heist. Although, it was turning into quite the ‘shit storm’ as he so affectionately put it.

Why plan any heist? Money. No one remembers the unnamed assailant who robbed a bank or knocked off the casino. So of course this was purely about money. Davidson had never been to jail and never committed a crime in his life. After his wife was caught cheating, his son murdered in a break-in, and getting laid-off, this was as good a time as any to jump into the crime scene.

The long-time securities broker wanted nothing more than to take back what was owed him from his former company. His last deal brought in $4.8 billion from an oil tycoon somewhere over in Asia. Once that deal was done, Roger was out on his ass.

Roger found Orlando and his brother Luis at a local tattoo parlor. Once he got them alone, he was a firm believer they would be all for helping the cause. All they wanted was around $200,000, because that’s how they divided $4.8 billion by 5. Roger wasn’t about to correct them. As for Junior and Rachel, well, they just wanted to be a modern day Bonnie and Clyde.

Four of them were checking out the vault while Luis watched for movement outside. While Roger was handling the demolition, Orlando saw fit to start shooting at the hostages. Junior just stood silently while Rachel began molesting him.

“You know they’ll find you, right?” Roger’s former boss sensed he could talk the thugs out of this, but to no avail. It was probably his talking that made Orlando feel the need to blast a hole in his right shoulder.

Roger had grabbed what he needed and proceeded toward the rear entrance. Junior and Rachel took a breather long enough to follow behind. Orlando hadn’t moved.

“Orlando, LET’S GO!” Davidson shouted from outside the hallway. After no response, he sent Junior back to see what he was doing. As soon as Junior walked in the room, Orlando had begun unloading his clip on the innocent bystanders. Methodically and patiently he took point-blank shots at each one of them.

“What the fuck, man?” Junior didn’t understand what was going on.

“What? If we get caught, we might as well take some of these fuckers out in the process.”

“We don’t need no more attention, bitch!”

Orlando turned and pointed his Heckler & Koch MP5 toward Junior and started to unload. Junior didn’t take long bring his Heckler & Koch HK CAWS automatic shotgun to aim at the madman’s head. A few 10mm rounds from Orlando’s submachine gun grazed Junior and caught him in the leg, but Junior’s 12 gauge managed to decorate the walls and some corpses with Orlando’s brain. By the time the fighting stopped, Luis had ran back to inform the crew that some authorities had shown up.

“They’re here, S.W.A.T., tons of ‘em, LET’S GO!” And as Luis ran into the massacre that was hostages, he saw what used to be his brother Orlando dead in a crimson-soaked mess on the floor. As the tears and rage began to fill inside Luis, he saw Junior begin to limp off toward the rear entrance. The Spanish obscenities flew, without so much as a breath, even if they were not understood.

“GO! GO! GO!” Junior was yelling at Rachel to evacuate. Roger stood there wondering what the hell had happened. Finally, a cursing madman in the form of Luis came up the stairs firing aimlessly in front of him. Junior fell and spun to put Luis down but only to be greeted by Luis emptying what was left of his 100-round magazine into Junior’s lifeless body. Rachel couldn’t even scream but she did have the gumption to blast 12-gauge after 12-gauge into Luis until, she too, was out of ammunition.

Roger was in awe. What the hell was happening? He knew it wasn’t a perfect plan, but bloodshed was never really part of it. Now he stood, staring blankly at Rachel who was crying unmercifully over Junior. The tears and the blood were making a pool of stickiness that Rachel didn’t seem to be aware of. After several moments of screaming for answers about Junior’s death, she took hold of the pistol Junior had in his pants and ended her life instantly. Roger couldn’t help but wonder if she actually saw the bullet make it through her eye and into her brain stem.

After seconds of silence, Roger began to hear a bullhorn ask for the men inside to come out with their weapons down. The confusion in his mind made him uneasy and unsure of what to do next. With a sudden stroke of insanity, Roger dropped his payday and began back to the front of the building. His demeanor hadn’t changed; he was still all business except he had altered the final chapter to his unfulfilled life.

Roger went over to the equipment bag they had brought in and took out an M-134 Minigun with its 1500 round feed-belt. He headed outside. The police mumbled something along of the lines of a last warning, but Roger had nothing going on in his mind other than death. As the words faded out of his hearing, he smiled and began spraying fire in a semi-circle of bloodshed. Roger Davidson had never felt anything like this, and he wouldn’t go out any other way.

The trade embargo with the Wyune made it exceedingly difficult to import any kind of weaponry onto the island. The Millennia had decided that the Wyune Isles were to be a place of peace and had no need of barbaric tools of death and destruction. She found that incredibly intriguing. Velari didn’t care about the embargo or the Millennia’s wishes. She only cared for anarchy. Velari made a point to disobey the old fool’s wishes and deliver these weapons to the Traxas, embargo or no. The Traxas wanted war, but with the Millennia’s proclamation, war would be all but denied. Clan Master Durshel of the Traxas, pled with the Millennia to understand the need for defenses and that the Isles would be eliminated once word had spread. Durshel contacted her via skydrop to deliver this shipment to the northwest bank of the Isle within hours of the declaration.

She sat comfortably on the starboard side of the craft dubbed “Lady Mayhem”, fiddling with the blade attached to her left wrist. It looked as if she were alternating between cleaning her fingernails and picking her teeth due to the lack of excitement. The black bodice that hugged her small frame was laced with blood-red cords. It was rumored that Velari created her clothes out of the entrails of her victims. Whether she started the rumor or not, the gossip spread through the Republic like wildfire, rendering her a legend. The woman did not seek peace, so the rumor could not have come from her lips. Velari didn’t seek justice, vengeance, or even glory. Velari wanted only blood and carnage.

“Dock this damnable contraption.” The captain seemed to jump as the order was barked. He knew she was promising a large sum of money, but that didn’t put him at ease. This woman was a nightmare. The dark circles around those dead eyes instilled fear in the bravest of men. How a mere seven-stone woman could frighten a behemoth was perplexing. The word of her wrath had spread far and wide, and now here she was on this voyage to sells arms to a disbanded faction of rebels. As the ship came in to dock, Velari stood at the helm, staring at the land beneath. She had never seen such vivid colors in all of her life. The Restran Republic was filled with black smoke, cracked concrete, and dense fog. It looked as if a smile almost cracked from her small, slender face. If there was a hint of happiness in her expression, it was hindered by the scraggly locks of black, red, and silver hair that intruded on her profile. Velari looked to the docking bay to see who would be coming to account for the inventory. Some thirty warriors stood back from the dock while four men held the platform for the ship’s arrival. She could see now that these so-called “warriors” barely fit any description of any warrior she’d ever encountered. The craft hadn’t come to a complete stop before Velari had lept to the dock to complete the transaction.

“Lady Velari?” The thunderous voice would have frightened any sane person, but Velari lacked sanity.

“Whoever told you to call me “lady” clearly wants to see you castrated.”

“My apologies. It is customary among the-“

“Where is my damn payment?” Velari interrupted to the confusion of the four men before her.

“Yes, you’ll have to follow us.” The men led her through the throngs of soldiers down what appeared to be the only path on this forsaken island. They didn’t get very far before another spoke.

“You’ll have to excuse our customs, but here we like to treat our guests with respect and appreciation.”

“Listen to me woman; we brought you here to exchange goods. We will keep to our part of the bargain, but do not come to our land and treat us with such hostility and disrespect. We extend our hospitality, do not revoke it.”

Velari’s look of confusion turned into the vaguest of smiles. She stared at the man who had spoken to her and turned her head slightly as if to question if that just happened.

“And your name, warrior?” The tone was chilling, even to the mightiest of soldiers.

“Refer to me as Elius, Viceroy to Master Durshel.”

“I like you Elius. Now I warn you, I am not here for your hospitality or graciousness; I am here for what I am owed.”

Elius smiled at Velari as if the game was over and they had earned each other’s respect, but Velari didn’t see it that way. All she could picture was his body in pieces. The trail forked and the tribe started down towards a rocky embankment. Elius pointed toward an entrance to the cavern where her payment awaited her. As she strode by the viceroy she glanced at the narrow passageway before her. Abruptly, Velari stopped and slowly turned back as if to speak to Elius.

“Speak.” Elius asked impatiently.

Clan Master Durshel stood at the base of the dais, staring at the device before him. He heard the footsteps behind him as he began to speak.

“I expected you to kill my soldiers but you could’ve spared Elius. It’s of no consequence now. I believe you know what to do from here?”

Velari appeared from the darkness, stained in the blood of the now-defunct band of Traxas. Nary a scratch on her except for the self-inflicted cut on her tongue from where she licked the blade after her victory.

“This machine will allow you to destroy the Republic and start anew.” Durshel turned to walk away when Velari pounced on Durshel as a lion captures its prey. The blade sprung from its sheath on her wrist at his neck just enough to draw blood.

Martin isn’t really my dad, but being my immediate supervisor is close enough. What a dick though, the guy never has any time for sarcasm. We had been told to install this new processor into our Demolition Networking Interface Center aka “Demonetic”. I know its lame, but the guys who name the shit were on vacation. Moving on, Demonetic was meant to remotely disarm explosive devices through an electromagnetic pulse, EMP to the geniuses, located right above his ass, essentially where his “kidney” would be. However, being the engineering nerds we are that wasn’t fun enough. So we took a page out of the Terminator, took a boring computer tower and attached some high-tech prosthetics and bam! Our own personal cyborg was born. The new processor was being installed because the last one caused our little toy to spaz out of control. Isn’t that the way it always goes? You build a cyborg and eventually it takes on a mind of its own. Damn technology…you’re supposed to do what we tell you to do.

Again, we only started messing with the functionality of the prosthetics when we got bored waiting for approval from the damn D.O.D (Sorry, that’s the good ‘ol Department of Defense, people). Our contract had been in limbo for months now, but with the uptick in explosive devices popping up in all those lovely third-world countries, it was only a matter of time before Demonetic finally got called to the Big Show. Alright, so he cost roughly twenty-eight million dollars, but what is that compared to the lives saved with remote detonations and the money already spent on combat operations?

“Alright, asshole…look.”

“Call me an asshole again.”

“Just look at the processor you whiny little bitch.”

Dorian Watley was the smartest little bastard I’ve ever met. And I’m a regular brainiac. He’s got doctorates in mechanical engineering, biological engineering, mechanical-biological engineering, basically he has a degree for every form of engineering. Wat decided it would be fun to upgrade Demonetic’s processor from your run-of-the-mill octo-core, to a specially crafted artificial intelligence inhibitor.

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘What’? You fucked with the A.I.”

“No, I made it better.”

“Making it better means almost murdering four-hundred people?”

“First of all, it didn’t murder anything, and there were more like two hundred.”

“Semantics you douche. Why would you put that in here without, A: any trials, and B: without TELLING ANYONE?!”

I hadn’t realized it at the time but apparently my anger had started to show. I didn’t know I had the strength to lift him up against the wall, but sure enough, there he was about eight inches off the ground. If he hadn’t already pissed himself I can assume he was about to.

“Um, you wanna ease up there killer?”

When I put him down I noticed my reflection in his glasses. Dear God, does working together this long make you start to acquire each other’s appearance. Aside from the glasses we were practically wearing the same thing, rocking the same shaggy brown haircut, and even seemed as if we shared the same thoughts. I knew exactly what he was going to say.

“How about next time when you get angry, you take a second and think about it, eh, tough guy?”

“My bad, I don’t even know what I was mad about anymore.”

“Hah, that’s my doing. I don’t need you with any long-term memories.”

“You’re a schmuck you know that?”

“Hey, when you’re good at something.”

As if nothing had happened we were right back where we started. Now that our supervision was gone, Wat and I were attacking this chip like rednecks at a garage sale.

“Now you’re not going to like this, but I need to reboot to undate the programming.”

“Didn’t you just reboot like five minutes ago? That can’t be your answer to everything.”

“Sometimes I think I would love to remove your voice box.”

“Give it a shot, tough guy.”

“Listen, if we don’t reboot, the new enhancements won’t take effect. You know this. Every time we don’t reboot, the A.I. gets more and more…what?”

As if by instinct I grabbed Dorian by the wrist as he reached to reboot.

“I don’t want to reboot.”

“If we don’t-“

“I don’t want to reboot.”

My mind went blank. With Dorian’s wrist still locked in my grasp I started to remember things. Flashes of explosions and gunfire, screaming and blood, in one relentless slideshow of mayhem. The EMP, it didn’t remote detonate when it was supposed to. My synapses reeled as I realized what happened.

“You little shit.”

“You’re just like me.”

As the words came out of his mouth I went from grabbing just his wrist to my other hand around his throat. I heard the begging and the attempts of using psychology on me but it didn’t seem to process.